HAYDEN — Four patrons took shelter from the freezing rain and hail Sunday afternoon between a parked, green-and-white 18-wheeler and delivery van outside Hayden City Hall.

Separating the two Coeur Greens logo-covered vehicles was a tarped booth, which featured donated canned foods, informative brochures and a flat-screen TV playing a short educational video.

Some people came to donate. Others were curious what the set-up was for.

Drew McNabb, Coeur Greens farm manager, was happy to accommodate both.

His vertical farming start-up teamed up with Community Action Partnership Food Bank over the weekend to raise donations for local needy families and bring awareness to the importance of fresh, local food.

Coeur Greens is a new ag-tech focusing on providing fresh, sustainable grown local produce year-round for the Coeur d'Alene area. The food — namely leafy greens such as lettuce and kale — is grown inside the 320-square-foot re-purposed shipping container, one that was on display Saturday and Sunday.

"About 60 to 80 percent of retail lettuce is from southern California. It takes about 800-900 miles of travel before it's consumed and loses half of its nutritional value before it gets up here," said McNabb, one of four people who are part of the start-up. "So our plan is to have it harvested and out to people within 24 hours."

The re-purposed shipping container dubbed Leafy 1 was parked in the front of the Coeur d'Alene Public Library on Saturday and near Hayden City Hall on Sunday. They raised over 400 cans of non-perishable food donations.

Coeur Greens will be also giving around 800 heads of lettuce grown inside Leafy 1 to St. Vincent de Paul.

"A lot of kids around don't know there are other kids in the area that are without food. So we wanted them to donate a canned food item and teach them about how some of it is grown," McNabb said.

The growing trend of indoor vertical farming is the practice of growing food in a vertical stack, such as a shipping container or warehouse, all of which are environmentally controlled.

Leafy 1, which was recently in the Coeur d'Alene and Hayden winter parades, is climate-controlled and works from a handheld app. It holds the equivalent of two acres of farm land and stays at adequate growing temperatures, no matter the outside temperature.

It also features seven nutrient dosers, a video camera, and goes through just 10 gallons of water a day. It will be doing its first planting Dec. 13 and will be in full production in four weeks, where it will be capable of producing 1,000 heads of GMO and pesticide-free heads of lettuce a week.

It's a family business of sorts, too. McNabb's father, Tom McNabb, helps out as a farmhand in a business that is also working in concert with the Farm to School program, which encourages schools to produce from local sources while educating communities.

The elder McNabb enjoyed teaching locals about vertical farming while also spreading awareness of needy families.

"We figured we'd use the opportunity to do some community work," Tom McNabb said. "The people have been great.

“It's funny. The kids come, and we ask them where their can of food is going — they say no — well, there's people that don't have food, and they're kind of shocked."

Leafy 1, which can fit up to 4,500 heads of lettuce, was a beat-up shipping container on its way to a Boston scrap yard before it was purchased and revamped. It will soon be permanently set in a Coeur d'Alene warehouse when operations begin.